Jean Strouse on John Singer Sargent & the Wertheimers, with Michael Wood

Jean Strouse on John Singer Sargent and the Werthheimers, with Michael Wood

Tuesday, December 17, 6:30 pm

the Skylight Room, the Graduate Center

365 5th Ave., New York, NY 10016

Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career―and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
In commissioning this grand series of paintings, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became Sargent’s greatest private patron and close friend. The Wertheimers worked with Rothschilds and royals, plutocrats and dukes―as did Sargent. Asher left most of his Sargent portraits to the National Gallery in London, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise: it was a new thing for a family of Jews to appear alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats and dignitaries painted by earlier masters.
Strouse’s account, set primarily in England around the turn of the twentieth century, takes in the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy and the dramatic rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. It travels back through hundreds of years to the Habsburg court in Vienna and forward to fascist Italy in the 1930s. Its depictions of Sargent, his sitters, their friendships and circles, and the portraits themselves light up a period that saw tumultuous social change and the birth of the modern art market.
Sargent brilliantly portrayed these transformations, in which the Wertheimers were key players. Family Romance brings their interwoven stories fully to life for the first time.

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier, and Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. From 2003 to 2017, she served as Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. Her new book, Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2024.

Michael Wood studied French and German at Cambridge University and was a fellow of St John’s College. He taught at Columbia, Exeter and Princeton, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. He has written books on Stendhal, Nabokov, Yeats, and Hitchcock, and is the author, most recently, of On Empson (2017), The Habits of Distraction (2018), and Marcel Proust (2023). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and for several other journals.

Host or Publisher The Leon Levy Center for Biography